


Trying Again

by Dreamin



Series: Snarky and Sweet [2]
Category: Knives Out (2019), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 09:57:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21318310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreamin/pseuds/Dreamin
Summary: After some disappointing news, Ransom turns to the woman who caught his eye, Darcy Lewis.
Relationships: Darcy Lewis/Ransom Thrombey
Series: Snarky and Sweet [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1536817
Comments: 35
Kudos: 145





	Trying Again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afteriwake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afteriwake/gifts).

> This is a sequel to _Perfectly Lined Up_.
> 
> I haven't seen _Knives Out_ yet so I had to fill in the blanks with my own headcanons.

Ransom glanced once more at his phone. _C’mon, Darcy. Text me. Call me. Something…_ He was sitting on the couch in his late grandfather’s study while the rest of the family trickled in.

“Are you even listening to me, Ransom?” his mother demanded from where she leaned against Harlan’s desk.

He rolled his eyes, his focus still on his phone. “Every word, Linda.”

“Mother,” she corrected him sharply.

“Since you’ve never been maternal a day in your life, you should be thankful that I called you that for as long as I did.”

She stormed away, making a beeline for the antique-looking globe on a wooden stand. More specifically, for the bottle of Scotch hiding inside the globe.

_Harlan never liked being far from a drink,_ Ransom thought fondly. His love for the finer things in life was one of the things he inherited from his grandfather, though he had missed out on the gene that insisted he actually care for his belongings. Frayed and holey sweaters, loafers that were beat to hell, none of it bothered him. Linda said it was because he never knew the real value of a dollar since he had never worked for his money, but to Ransom, they were nice things but they were just **things**.

Things, no matter how pretty or costly, were disposable.

He checked his phone once more. _If I have to sit around waiting for Alan to show up, Darcy could at least entertain me._ His grandfather’s longtime lawyer was late for the will reading and it was making everyone even more antsy around each other than usual.

“And what are you doing?” his Aunt Joni asked in her usual tone of half-bitchy, half-nosy. “Trolling?”

“No,” Ransom said, not looking up from his phone, “that’s Jacob’s thing.”

“My Jacob is an angel,” his Aunt Donna protested, aghast. “He would never-”

“Oh, grow up, Donna,” Linda muttered before taking a sip of her drink. “Jacob’s a Nazi.”

“Just like Joni is a Gwyneth Paltrow wanna-be and Linda thinks she’s the next Donald Trump,” Ransom said, smiling to himself.

“You could at least pretend to be polite, Ransom,” Richard admonished him.

Ransom looked his father right in the eye. “Just like you pretend to be faithful?”

Every “adult” in the room shouted, “RANSOM!” His father’s infidelity was the family’s worst-kept secret, but it was nominally still a secret.

He merely chuckled as he went back to his phone. Finally, a text came in.

**Don’t let your family get the better of you.**

Ransom grinned as he saved Darcy’s number to his contacts then sent a text back. **Believe me, in a battle of wits, they’re all unarmed.**

**Yeah, you’ve got that ‘smartest guy in the room’ smugness about you.**

**With these people, I’m also ‘the only adult in the room.’ As the day goes on, they’ll act more and more like children.**

**Et toi? (That’s the extent of my French, btw.)**

He chuckled. **Spoiled brattiness knows no age.**

**At least you can admit it. ;)**

Ransom was just typing out a reply when Linda snatched the phone out of his hands. “Alan’s here, you can have this back when he’s done.”

“Real mature,” he muttered.

Ransom had taken the phone back as soon as the will-reading was over but it wasn’t until that night, when he was sitting in bed in his downtown Boston apartment, that he called Darcy.

She picked up after the first ring. “Hi. So, I take it this means you survived your relatives.”

Ransom chuckled. “Hi. Barely. There was some … unpleasantness at the will-reading, but I didn’t come off any worse than anyone else.”

“Will-reading?” she echoed, surprised. “When you said you were going to your grandfather’s, I thought you meant you were going to see him.”

“No, Harlan died a few days ago.”

Darcy paused. “Harlan? As in Harlan Thrombey?”

Ransom smiled a bit. “I doubt there’s another Harlan in Boston so yeah.”

“He was one of my favorite authors. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thanks. We weren’t exactly close, but we weren’t exactly distant either.”

“Which means…?”

Ransom chuckled. “We saw each other fairly frequently, but we were never more than civil.”

“And why is that?”

“Harlan wanted at least one of his offspring to follow in his writing footsteps. Since all three kids were a bust, he set his sights on his grandkids. I was the first, so I got the brunt of his attempts to make me into a best-selling novelist.”

“This I gotta hear.”

He chuckled again as he leaned back against the pillow. “I hope you’re comfy.”

“Never comfier.”

_I wonder what she’s wearing right now._ “He agreed to pay for my college education if I picked a writing-related major. I went with English Lit.”

“Great,” she muttered, “so you studied long-dead white men and their chauvinist, racist, classist writings.”

Ransom grinned. “Actually, I prefer Austen and the Brontes, but don’t lump Shakespeare in with those other guys, he was ahead of his time. I’m getting off track. It didn’t take long for me to realize I didn’t have my grandfather’s gift for original fiction. By my second year of college, I was writing fanfic exclusively.”

That piqued her interest. “AO3 or Fanfiction.net?”

“There’s a difference?” he asked, smirking knowingly.

“Bite your tongue!”

He chuckled. “Harlan knew, even though I never shared my writings with him. He may have lurked on AO3, I’m not sure. He was always prodding me to try original fiction. At one point, he suggested that we collaborate.”

“He must have believed in you.”

“He did, but we were in two different worlds.”

She paused again. “Disappointing your family is part of growing up.”

Ransom smiled a bit. “I was doing that long before I grew up, believe me.”

He could hear typing on the other end of the line. “I’m on Harlan’s Wikipedia page. Your mom must be Linda Drysdale. Says here she was a big name in the Boston real estate market in the ‘90s but she’s made a bunch of bad decisions since.”

“Yeah,” Ransom muttered, “like staying married to my father. But seriously, buying the apartment building I live in was the last good business decision she made, and that was sixteen years ago. She just … lost her touch. You know what she did the day before my grandfather’s birthday last week?”

“What?”

“She asked him for a $20 million business loan. That’s on top of the $1 million he lent her to start her real estate business originally.”

Darcy let out a low whistle. “Did she get it?”

“No. He wanted her to stand on her own two feet. He wanted that for all of us, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

“What, you’re saying you’re not gainfully employed?”

Ransom chuckled. “I’ve never worked a day in my life – as soon as I turned twenty-five, I had full, unrestricted access to the trust fund Linda and Harlan set up for me. The problem is that while I’m great at spending money, no one ever taught me how to spend it wisely. Thirteen years later, my trust fund is nearly gone.”

“I take it you’re about to tell me you asked your grandfather to refill it.”

“Basically,” he admitted, not without a little shame. _There’s something I haven’t felt before._

“And?”

“He said if I got a job, he’d match my salary, but he wasn’t going to just give me money.”

“I gotta say, I’m on his side.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ransom muttered, rolling his eyes. “I know it’s heartless but I thought if I could just get my money to last as long as Harlan did, I’d get a nice chunk of his estate after he passed.”

“Which brings us to today. Since you don’t sound like you’re in the partying mood, I’m guessing you didn’t get much.”

“One dollar.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. It’s the same amount he gave to each of his heirs.” He chuckled. “Linda and Walter (her brother) competed to see who could blow a bigger gasket. Joni threatened to sue the estate. I’m not really sure how that would work now. Within ten minutes, all of them said they would contest the will in court.”

“But wasn’t your grandfather worth millions?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what’ll happen to the rest of the money?”

“I have a theory. While everyone else was calling their lawyers, I asked Alan if I could see the will. At the bottom, I noticed something Alan neglected to say when he read it out loud.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense, Ransom.”

He grinned. “The letters T, B, and C.”

“TBC?” She paused. “Wait, like ‘to be continued?’”

“Exactly. I think Harlan wrote a two-part will. Maybe he wanted us to actually do something with our lives before we come into our inheritance.”

“Is that legal?”

“Don’t know, I studied Lit, not Law.”

“Did you tell your family?”

He smirked. “And give up my edge? God, no.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

“A regular nine-to-five job is definitely not my thing. I decided I’ll give original writing another try. Not murder mysteries, but maybe romance novels? Under a female pen name, of course.”

“Oh, you’re a fluff writer. I never would’ve guessed.” Her grin was audible.

He could feel his cheeks warm. “Actually, I’m a smut writer, but there’s always plenty of fluff.”

“Nice! Send me a link to your profile and I’ll check out your stuff.” She paused. “And the next time I’m in Boston, maybe you and I could do a little ‘research’ for your book.”

Ransom grinned. “I’d like that.”

“Or, the next time you’re in New York.”

He smiled a bit. “That’s where you live?”

“Yep. Transplant, not native. My boss followed her boyfriend to the Big Apple and I followed her.”

“Nice. Let me know if I’m being too forward but-”

“Yes?” she cut in, grinning again.

“What are you doing for Thanksgiving?”


End file.
